I’d never been in any kind of VIP section in my life, but as soon as the frosty air hit me and my eyes adjusted to the pale green hues and ten-watt lighting, I knew I could get used to it. It’s a disgusting idea, that a room is worth occupying just because other people aren’t allowed to enter. Until you’re inside.
Cloud was no longer the lithe, skinny kid I’d seen in photos, his high-top fade unintentionally cropped out of every frame. The first thing I thought when he sprang off the couch was that we’d walked into the wrong room, and the King of Bouncers was going to throw us through the wall and into the right one. The guy looked like a black He-Man action figure somebody had painted a linen suit and a ridiculous jaunty captain’s hat on. Before I knew it he had Billy in midair, locked in a bearhug worthy of an actual bear.
“Aaaaaaaaah! Welcome to your welcome home, baby! Goddamn, you a sight for sore eyes.”
The guest of honor set my father down, and threw an arm around my shoulders. “Last time I saw this cat,” he announced, “nigga dookied right through his diaper and ruined my, ha, what was it? One of those silk house shirts with the big Kwame polka dots, I think. Did me a favor. Show some love, dog.” My feet didn’t leave the ground, but the embrace popped three vertebrae.
Cloud lifted his chin toward yet another bouncer. “All right. Everybody I care about’s on board. Tell your man to weigh anchor or whatever the fuck.”
“Yes sir.” To his lips, with a burst of static, came the walkie-talkie.
“Good. Ay mister DJ, you ready to do the damn thing, or you need another mojito first?”
“I been ready,” came a voice from the bar in the rear. “This weak shit they playing, it came with the boat or what?”
“Yeah. Got a rule about no live performance till you leave the dock.”
At that moment, the ship lurched into motion. I felt it for a few seconds, a horizontal version of that strangely pleasant elevator-drop nutsack-tingle-tug, and then it became so normal that if not for the shrinking Manhattan outside the window, I would have forgotten. There was something very liberating, though, about seeing the skyline fade into miniature, as if New York was loosening its vise-grip on all our lives.
“See you on the dancefloor, party people.” The DJ slurped the last of his drink—whatever a mojito was, I wanted one—doled out a few knuckle-bumps, and moseyed toward the door. He had it open when the Ambassador, present despite his agoraphobia, piped up. Perfect timing on the blind man, as usual.
“Naw man, you’re for the common folk. We got a special DJ coming for the VIPs. Brother named Doo Wop.”
The room galloped with laughter, Cloud’s roar leading the charge. The DJ grinned and raised a pair of middle fingers to his chest, then slapped the door back open and was gone.
I sidled up to Karen. At least two dudes, a dread in tinted glasses and a stocky goateed whiteboy, peeped the familiarity of my approach, decided I was her man, and turned their attentions elsewhere.
“Explain.”
My mother smiled around the Heineken tipped to her lips.
“That was Kid Capri. You ever heard of him?”
“Sure. But I thought it was pronounced ‘Kiiiiiid Capri.’ That’s how he says it on those old mixtapes. I always wanna be like ‘we know your name, fool, we bought your joint. Shut up and play the music.’”
She laughed. The green of the bottle matched her dress, which was sleeveless. Whatever she’d rubbed into her skin gave it a glow. For a second I saw what those guys did—or, at least, I noticed how pretty ol’ Wren 209 could be when she felt like it.
“He and Doo Wop had this huge battle back in ’91, ’92, dissing each other on mixtapes. Everybody thought Capri was Puerto Rican until Wop outed him as a whiteboy.”
Billy sauntered over from the bar. “His father is Italian, moms is Jewish. Which makes him Jewish. Like me.”
Karen plucked the highball glass from his hand. “Name one Jewish holiday, and Chanukah doesn’t count. Ew, what is this, rum? Who drinks straight rum?”
“Yom Kippur,” said Billy. “Day of Atonement.”
“Take your rum.” She shoved it at him. “Your father’s got a lot of balls, talking to me about atonement.”
“You asked him to name a holiday.”
Karen’s hands fell to her hips, a kind of first-position for her. “So how will you be spending Yom Kippur, Billy? Any plans?”
My father shrugged. Either he didn’t get it, or he was doing a brilliant not-getting-it impression. “You’re supposed to fast, I guess.”
Enter the goateed whiteboy, no longer sweating my mother so as to concentrate on jocking my father. He flanked our perimeter and did a little weight-shifting foot-to-foot two-step, the hip-hop cracker version of a jazz bandleader counting off the tune. When he had his entry timed, he laid a hand on Billy’s shoulder.
“Excuse me, dude, but . . . are you Rage?”
My father clanged the ice cubes around in his glass, drizzled the last of the liquor down his throat.
“I used to be.”
“No shit? Oh, man, I knew it!” His hand sprang up like it was on hydraulics. “Dregs, TWS—Total Wreck Squad, Toys Won’t Survive, whatever. Yo, you were my man when I was a kid. Yo—” He reached into his shoulder bag and brought out a hardcover sketchbook plastered with stickers, and a fistful of Sharpies. “Do me the honor?”
Billy accepted the blackbook in slow motion—as if the action were involuntary, the ritual a dim muscle memory. A blackbook was the first thing a writer bought, or stole: diary, guest register and laboratory in one. Billy had probably blessed thousands in his day; style was DNA, and these things spread it the way bees spread pollen. Go to a graffiti gallery opening, and all you’ll see is writers bent double, using their knees and one another’s backs as drafting tables, a spectacle every bit as orgiastic and aesthetically unpleasant as a million horseshoe crabs propagating the species on a beach.
My father blinked at the selection of writing utensils. It was as if everything were in code for him. Like instead of markers and a blackbook he saw some rekmras and a kablobcok, and was paralyzed until he could unscramble what and why.
He picked a red, uncapped it one-handed, began to write. The Sharpie never broke contact with the page, and I thought of the Japanese black water painters Fever had told me about. They used parchment stretched so thin that any unnatural stroke or interruption to the line, any attempt to correct an error, would destroy the piece. It was supposed to force you to communicate without deliberation. Much as breaking the law did.
Billy’s eyes roamed as he wrote. He could have been a doctor signing a prescription pad, a lawyer initialing a page his secretary thrust at him while they marched down a corridor. I looked out the window. We were gliding through open water now, someplace south of the city, and the sun was flirting with the horizon. A drumbeat I vaguely recognized shook the floor, competing with the growling engine.
Billy finished, and me and Dregs and Karen nearly bumped heads leaning in to look. I braced myself for a jumble of mystic symbols, or even BRACKEN KILLED AMUSE. But on the upper right quadrant of the page was a vintage RAGE tag. The hands didn’t forget.
Dregs nodded. “Fucking cool, man. Right on.”
Billy capped the marker, held it out to him. Karen beat Dregs to it.
“May I?”
It threw Dregs for a loop, I could tell, but he played it off, “please, be my guest,” and cocked his head to watch. A dude his age—I put Dregs at twenty-five, old enough to remember seeing Billy’s name fly by but too young to have bombed the lines himself—probably didn’t know a single female writer. I doubt you’ll find too many women dressing up in Union blues and spending their weekends reenacting the battles of the Civil War either, if you get my meaning.
A hardcore Rage-ophile would’ve known who had bogarted his book, or at least h
ad a strong hunch. Dregs wasn’t that. When Karen handed it back, it took him several seconds to decipher the signature under Billy’s—time enough for me to imagine the days when the 2s and 5s had been my parents’ love letters, chugging from Prospect to Crotona with their names entwined for all to see. Motherfuck an oak tree and a knife.
“Immortalette 1?”
Karen returned his pen. “A.k.a. Wren 209.”
Dregs nodded. “Right on.” There’s some kind of protocol about when you explicitly acknowledge knowing who somebody is and when you don’t. I’m not sure which is more respectful or when you do what, but many an eye’s been blackened over such things. Karen’s hands stayed at her sides, so I guessed everything was cool.
Dregs turned back to Billy. “So like, where have you been, dude? I heard you were dead, heard you were underground, heard you were doing Pepsi murals in Japan. . . .”
My father rubbed his head, scratched his ear. Rubbed his head again. Little fragments of scalp fell, dusted Billy’s shoulders.
“I’ve been learning shamanic healing from plant spirits in the Amazon.”
I tried not to laugh as Dregs rifled through his brain for an appropriate response.
“Right on, right on. Been painting at all?”
All of a sudden, a kind of frenzy seemed to fill Billy, and he grabbed my wrist. “Nobody can know I’m here,” he blurted. His eyes bored into Dregs, then into me. “Who is he? Why are we talking to him?”
I put a hand on Billy’s back. “It’s okay. Relax. He’s cool.”
Dregs just stood there, looking earnest. “There are some legal issues,” I told him, trying to sound offhand.
“My lips are sealed.” He performed a pantomime to that effect.
“Right on,” I said, filing the phrase under Whiteboy-Ubiquitous, and raised an eyebrow at Karen. “Time for another drink?”
“I think so.” She smiled at Dregs. “Nice meeting you.”
“You too. Enjoy yourselves.”
He was turning to go when Billy lunged, snatched the blackbook out of Dregs’s hand, riffled to his page, tore out his name, and stuffed it in his mouth.
Dregs and Karen and I watched Billy’s jaw work to break down the nice, thick paper stock. He looked at each of us in turn as he chewed, like the fucking classroom gerbil we had in second grade to teach us about loss and mourning. Spider-Man, we called him, the poor frail bastard.
Billy winced and raised his chin to swallow, Adam’s apple bulging against his throat like an overtaxed bass woofer.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“Can I have my book back?”
Billy obliged.
“I guess we really need that drink now,” I said, with the least credible chuckle in the history of fake mirth.
Dregs tucked his book beneath his arm. “Take care of him,” he said to me, and walked away.
“I don’t need this shit,” Karen announced, and followed.
I watched Billy watch her go. About twenty things I could have said came and went, from don’t worry, man, it’s gonna be all right to how would El Purga feel about you eating a tree to the punch line to that old Lone Ranger joke, whatchu mean “we,” white man? Finally, I just left him standing there. Got myself a mojito from the bar, took it downstairs and checked out chicks and sipped.
Kid Capri was in total control. The crowd trusted him, and from trust follows abandon. Girls get loose, because they aren’t subconsciously anticipating the coming of a lame song that will give them cover to hit the bathroom or the bar. Dudes navigate with confidence, knowing they don’t have to worry about a musical cockblock, an out-of-left-field switch from dancehall to merengue just when they’re getting their swerve on.
Dengue likes to talk about how, back in the day, if the crowd didn’t dig a record Afrika Bambaataa played, Bam would bring the needle back and play it again, and then a third time, and a fourth, until the people heard what he did. The party owed its existence to the benevolence and good grace of the DJ; he kept the peace and the pace, controlled the space-time continuum by backspinning beginnings, doubling a moment or erasing it, putting his fingerprints all over history. Today, he’s treated like a servant, a human jukebox. Dengue calls that a tragedy, and I tend to agree.
Capri wasn’t dishing up alien cuisine, but he wasn’t serving the crowd a junk-food diet of new club hits either. He fed us tapas, just big enough to whet the appetite. You got a verse and a chorus, and then he dropped the next song, and the disappointment of goodbye vanished with the ecstasy of hello. He did a lot of teasing, which only works with an educated crowd: let us hear a famous horn fanfare and then pulled back the track just when we were ready to celebrate the blend. During the time it took me to finish my drink, he ran through fifteen minutes of nineties hip-hop, joints I recognized by Main Source and Black Moon, plus a bunch I didn’t. Then he segued to reggae of the same era with Super Cat’s “Ghetto Red Hot,” which was like taking a headcount of Jamaicans, since every last one of them kept a fist raised and swaying throughout the song, even the women.
Cloud stood in the middle of the floor, massive arms molding the air around his dance partner, a blonde whose chest bounced to the music in dizzying doubletime. She and Cloud were trying to carry on a conversation, which I took to be proof that they’d just met. Every few seconds, one would shout something into the other’s ear, and they’d both nod or smile.
Guests interrupted them constantly, coming over to offer hugs, congratulations, who knew what—hot tips on cash businesses with lax security, perhaps. Now and then I’d strain to place someone who looked familiar, then realize he wasn’t a writer Karen had gotten baked with in our living room, but a bonafide minor celebrity: Fat Joe, Kevin Powell, the fly Latina anchorwoman from New York One, a none-too-sober Dwight Gooden—who I only recognized because, Scout’s honor, he was wearing a Mets jersey with his name on it. I even thought I saw Al Sharpton, but it turned out to be some other sunken-eyed old man with processed hair.
It was beautiful, watching this crazy cross section of old-school New York City sweating and swaying in the open air beneath the glinting gold and pink and purple of what was shaping up to be a stunning sunset. Things were okay, I told myself. Shit would work out. We’d get Billy normal. He had friends, and they were not without resources.
At first, nobody paid any mind to the Coast Guard chopper hovering overhead. Capri neutralized the noise by cranking up his decibels, and folks turned back to the business of shaking ass. But minutes passed, and the chopper didn’t leave. All at once, the party started to understand that this was not a fly-by, but surveillance.
You know that sensation you get somewhere between your throat and stomach when you notice a cop watching? Doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of a crowd; you still feel immediately and intensely alone. Five seconds before, you might’ve been the mixed martial arts champion of the world, but now you’re a gazelle, and the lion has just yawned and lifted his head out of the underbrush.
Maybe white dudes in Dockers who are on some “Hello, Officer, I’m glad you’re here, those darn kids have been messing with my lawn again” type shit don’t know the feeling. And granted, I walk around with felony amounts of drugs on me, so I might be a little sensitive. But if you’re black, you know the feeling. Even Clarence Thomas knows it.
The wave of menace hit us all, and several hundred people who’d been experiencing a rare sense of carefreedom and connection were alone and vulnerable and hate-filled once again. The music seemed suddenly crass, irrelevant. It couldn’t save us. It wasn’t even trying.
If there’s some kind of disc jockey gold medal for skills under pressure, Kid Capri deserves like three. He slowed the record down until it sounded like a dying robot, let it grind to a halt. Silence for one second, two, and then Capri leaned over the mic and shouted, “New York City, make some noooiiiissseee!” and
brought in a new jam at a volume that turned the chopper blades into mosquito wings.
When they heard the song, the crowd went bananas, and the stress of the moment exploded in a shrapnel-storm of sound and motion. We were partaking in one of the perfect moments in the history of DJing, and we knew it.
The first time Kool Herc went back-to-back on “Funky Drummer” had to have been one. A prepubescent Grand Wizard Theodore climbing atop a milkcrate to debut the scratch, another. But in terms of pure song selection, which Dengue always touts as ninety percent of the craft, I can’t imagine anything more sublime than the rub-a-dub boom of “Police in Helicopter” at that moment and latitude and longitude. Not just for the topical poetry of it, but because if you listen to the lyrics—and I have, many times, because until he went away Abraham Lazarus kept the tune in heavy rotation—you realize that although John Holt sounds like he just smoked a pound of ishen, he’s crooning some of the most militant, fuck-the-cops lines ever penned:
Police in helicopter, a search fi marijuana
Policeman in the streets, searching for collie weed
Soldiers in the field, burning the collie weed
But if you continue to burn up the herbs
We gonna burn down the cane fields
Everybody seemed to know the words. Capri conducted a massive sing-along, and between our volume and the song’s, I thought we might blow the chopper right out of the sky. Which is stupid, I know, but until that day I never had much respect for helicopters. If you see one in an action movie, there’s about a sixty percent chance it will go down in flames, and that climbs to ninety if Bruce Willis is around. In real life, too, they seem absurdly flawed: every time you open a newspaper, sixteen Marines have just perished in a crashed Blackhawk for no adequately explained reason.
The craft repositioned itself slightly, and then a door opened and out dropped a coil of rope. We watched it straighten as it fell. The people in its path backed away and it thumped to the ground in front of Cloud, who hadn’t moved an inch. He scowled up at the chopper, and I imagined him yanking on the rope and bringing the thing crashing through the deck on some Incredible Hulk shit.
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